Written in 1991 by Mary Hoffman, with illustrations by Caroline Binch, Amazing Grace is perhaps the most enduring picture book with a BAME main character authored by a white writer. The book can be read as a story about challenging racism. Grace’s classmates, whilst not racially hostile towards her, do not believe that she can play the lead character in the class production of Peter Pan. The story’s conclusion – that in actuality she can – is a message of empowerment, but of a particular kind. Canonical literature, in the shape of Barrie’s Peter Pan, Longfellow’s Hiawatha and Kipling’s Jungle Books, are all shown as narratives that Grace can perform. Yet, they are all stories that have drawn criticism for their depiction of people of colour by white writers. Paul Fox, for example, discusses the depiction of American Indians (called by Barrie the ‘Picaninny tribe’) in Peter Pan as ‘embodying every conceivable racial stereotype of the primitive’
(Other Maps
Showing Through, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 32.3, 257). Patrick Brantlinger argues in Dark Vanishings (2003) that the ending of Longfellow’s Hiawatha indicates that ‘the explanation for . . . the future sad fate of all the Indians is the advent and spread of white civilizations’ (60). And one only has to read Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia to understand fully the problematic nature of ‘performing’ Kipling’s Mowgli, particularly by a person of colour.
Hoffman and Binch do include a depiction of Grace acting out Anansi stories also, but their examples are otherwise canonical European stories plus the inclusion of Aladdin within mention of the English tradition of pantomime. One of the popular versions of the Aladdin pantomime includes a character named Wishee- Washee, a ‘joke’ version of a Chinese name that recalls the ‘joke’ names in Little Black Sambo. These characters do not, therefore, support Grace’s identity as a person of colour, but as someone who has learned how to succeed in a white- and male- dominated world.
The message that black girls can play white boys in school plays isn’t one we would want to resist. Rather, we’d want to ask, ‘can they also play black girls?’ Girl characters like Malorie Blackman’s Hurricane Betsey or Girl Wonder would make excellent subjects for a curious, active girl like Grace to act out. Blackman’s series about these two girls first appeared in the 1990s, and were re-released with new illustrations by Janie Smith while Blackman was Children’s Laureate in 2014. However, unlike many of Blackman’s novels for older readers, these beginning chapter books for middle grade readers are rarely found on bookstore shelves. A girl like Grace who ‘loves stories’ and is Black British would have to have a good library, independent bookshop, or motivated adult around for her to find Blackman’s books, where she might just see herself reflected.
In response to Amazing Grace, our asking whether black girls can also play black girls in school plays prompts a shift from a focus on the imagination of readers to the imagination of authors, and this shift is vital if white authors are to join BAME authors in reflecting realities of Britain today.
Karen Sands-O’Connor is professor of English at SUNY Buffalo State in New York. She has, as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Newcastle University, worked with Seven Stories, the National Centre for the Children’s Book, and has recently published Children’s Publishing and Black Britain 1965-2015 (Palgrave Macmillan 2017).
Darren Chetty is a teacher, doctoral researcher and writer with research interests in education, philosophy, racism, children’s literature and hip hop culture. He is a contributor to The Good Immigrant, edited by Nikesh Shukla and published by Unbound, and tweets at @rapclassroom
Books for Keeps No.232 September 2018 13
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